Immediate warm applause was punctuated by cries of “Witch-hunt!”
Mrs Gloss, who appeared no less surprised by her own oratory than gratified by her audience’s reception of it, sat down in a glow and pretended to have lost her gloves among the cushions of her arm-chair.
“That,” said Henry Pearce as soon as he could make himself heard, “is all very well, but the question with me, Sister chairman, and with respect, is this. There wouldn’t be hordes of these policemen pushing into all our homes now if somebody hadn’t carried information. I think that the...”
Among several conflicting shouts of protest was one from Miss Amy Parkin.
“They found her car, didn’t they? And her clothes. It was only to be expected that they’d go round asking questions. I very much resent the insinuation of...of subversion that’s been made by Probationary Warlock Pearce.”
There were calls of “Hear, hear!” and “Withdraw!”
The object of the derogatory reference to rank, purple with fury, began to recite a curse, but his wife pulled him to his seat.
Mrs Framlington, finding appeals by pencil-tapping ineffective, opened a small metal box that stood beside the incense bowl and tried to tip a little of the greenish powder it contained upon the almost dead embers. In her agitation she cascaded a good ounce of powder into the bowl.
The resultant upsurge of thick, greasy smoke would have done credit to a burning tyre dump.
“Suppurating Satan!” muttered tall, scraggy Warlock Gooding as he shambled past the chairman’s table to fling open the french windows. None was so ungrateful as to rebuke him for blasphemy.
The debate was adjourned so that members might take advantage of Mrs Framlington’s invitation to stroll in the garden for a few minutes “in order”, as she phrased it, “to renew our store of Life Force from the great Pan“.
It was remarks of this kind which had done much to render invidious Mrs Framlington’s position as Coven chairman. The less tolerant members called her an old folksie, a white witch, and other uncomplimentary names. She was not what Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin would have termed “orgy-orientated” and although she never voiced criticism of those channels in which self-expression tended to flow at the quarterly Sabbath, her early retirement from the ceremony or, on occasion, failure to attend at all, left no one in doubt of her lukewarm attitude.
The truth was that Bertha Framlington had drifted into witchcraft for no better reason than that it lay in much the same latitude as other and earlier interests of hers. This lofty, raw-boned, untidy-looking woman, with her round, steel-rimmed glasses; thick stockings, always rumpled; woollen garments that gave the impression of having been tossed upon her as upon a chair-back, by their true owners; her expression of troubled but kindly anticipation as she listened to others, which she did with mouth a little open, for she was inclined to deafness; this woman who walked with long, uncertain strides as if bolts had worked loose in her leg joints, was the widow of the one-time proprietor of a small wines and spirits business which now had been merged into the Bride Street supermarket. She was a vegetarian whenever she remembered to be. She had once stood for the Borough Council as an anti-fluoride candidate and polled fifty-eight votes. A dedicated reversionist, she considered Arthur to have been the last British monarch worthy of the crown. She would have re-instituted the maypole and the setting out of bowls of cream for goblins—despite lack of response to a saucer of Carnation Milk she three times thrice had left on the elegant porch of 3 Mather Gardens. Witchcraft, to Mrs Framlington, was a Robin Goodfellow affair, a branch of home arts and crafts. She found it more sociable than Primitive Methodism, her late husband’s hobby; less bloodthirsty than whist drives; and not so damp as Spiritualism, which she had tried also, but briefly.
On its re-assembly, the Coven was served with refreshments. There were cups of tea brewed with what Sister Pearce, who had brought it, asserted to be font water. The tea certainly tasted odd (“like mildewed vestments”, Warlock Parkin appreciatively pronounced it, to the benefit of his reputation as a cognoscente) and Mrs Framlington swallowed only enough to carry down one of the biscuits contributed by Sister Gooding. These were grey and gritty with pink flecks and were handed round by their creator with the gloomy but insistent generosity of a distributor of the means of fulfilling a suicide pact. Sister Gooding had never divulged the recipe for her confection, which Mrs Gloss flippantly called her Crypt Crumble, and the curious had to make what they could of her husband’s enigmatic “She’s got a cousin who works at the hospital, you know.”
The discussion was resumed. Sister Henrietta Hall, the wife of the manager of a car-hire firm in St Anne’s Place, said that her husband had spoken of newspapermen arriving in the town from London. They had been asking questions about the Craft, and there was talk of photographs.
“Photographs? What photographs?” Warlock Parkin had swung round in some alarm.
“In the church, he says.”
“Photographs of what?” asked Amy Parkin.
“Things,” darkly replied Sister Hall, at the end of her seam of information.
“That’s quite true, actually,” confirmed Sister Gloss. “One of my cleaning women has a son in the police, and she came in this morning with a tale about the vicar having been found hanged in his own pulpit...”
“No!” exclaimed Warlock Parkin, eyes a-glitter.
“...not that he had, of course. It was an effigy of old Grewyear and he called the police in to see it. That and a couple of other little arrangements, as a matter of fact.”
Mrs Framlington peeked anxiously at Maiden Pentatuke. “That was never authorized, was it? Doing Mr Grewyear!”
The black minutes book was consulted. “Not in this month’s programme, certainly,” said Mrs Pentatuke. “Could Sister Gertrude be more specific about the other things the police are supposed to have been shown?”
“ ‘A mouse that was hanged and a toad impaled.’ ”
Significant glances were exchanged around the room. Mrs Gloss had spoken quietly but with a rhythmic intonation that she had not used in speaking of the effigy.
Silence was broken by Tossie Pearce.
“ ‘With this spell be your coffin nailed’,” she recited eflectively.
Some of the others nodded. The mouse and toad combination seemed to be an old favourite.
Mrs Framlington, though, looked anxious. “Those little creatures hadn’t suffered, had they?” she inquired of Sister Gloss.
“Well, how would I know? I didn’t put them there.”
“Has anyone seen the vicar today?” Mrs Framlington asked, with rather less concern.
“He looked all right at four o’clock, wolfing cakes in Brown and Derehams.” This information came from Sister Parkin.